Architect Plans a Drive-Innovation at Minor League Ballpark

Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal 

Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal ran Don Muret’s Breaking Ground column on an idea Pendulum had drawn into a Frontier League park then under construction in Normal, Illinois: a projection screen, 22 feet high and 52 feet wide, fixed permanently to the ballpark’s brick exterior and facing the parking lot.

The screen was built to show films on weekends and during games, and to carry sponsor messages the rest of the time. An FM modulator on site let people pick up the audio on a car radio. The design also studied a second screen on the back of the batter’s eye, facing a children’s playground beyond center field.

The reasoning was operational rather than novel. A minor league ballpark earns its return on the nights it is not hosting baseball, and a $12 million park has to work on most days of the week. Jonathan Cole put the intent plainly at the time: a family could watch a movie in the lot while the game went on inside.

The column noted that Pendulum was two years old, had designed the loge box retrofit at Modern Woodmen Park in Davenport, Iowa, and was a finalist to plan a park for the Green Bay Bullfrogs. The Normal project opened in 2010 as The Corn Crib.

Source: “Architect plans a drive-innovation at minor league ballpark”, Breaking Ground by Don Muret, Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal, May 18, 2009, page 11.

The framework Pendulum uses to judge a venue as a long term civic and financial system is set out in S.C.O.R.E.